OK, if you are an Engineer, you can easily consult after hours for >$50/hour. You are wasting 4 hours a day on transit. With 250 work days a year, that is about 1000 hours, or $50,000/year extra income if you spent that time consulting rather than commuting.
Does your rural/suburbian home still look that inexpensive?
Well, the problem is that at the distance you normally have from a movie screen, binocular stereo does not give you a lot of depth information (the parallax between the two eyes is simply too small). At that distance you get most of your depth info from other depth cues, such as motion parallax (while you move your head), or just learned object sizes (i.e if you have a human in the picture you can estimate his position relative to other objects, and therefore get an idea of their size etc).
So, since binocular stereo does not normally give you depth info for the movie setting, ALL 3D films do one of two things (otherwise you wouldn't see any 3D effect at all):
they amplify the parallax between eyes (i.e. they create the images with a camera spacing of a few feet rather than the 2 inches that you eyes are roughly spaced at), OR
they keep the natural parallax, but shoot really small scenes. So now the images will appear to be much closer than the screen. This is bad, because your eyes will have to focus at a different distance from where it thinks the object is located.
Both methods are known to cause motion/simulator sickness in a significant portion of the population. To really make good use of binocular stereo, you have to have a screen that is much closer than what you have in a movie theater.
That is only true in dark environments; a white background is much to bright in those settings. If you go to a normally lit office, the white emitted by a LCD panel is around the same intensity as the light reflected off a white sheet of paper, i.e. not painful to look at at all. In such environments, white (or green) on black tends to strain the eyes much more, since it is too dim.
I know a lot of geeks like dark working environments. However, it is well established that this is bad for your eyes in the longer run (especially if you also need to read printed documents in the same environment, even occasionally!). When we still had CRTs, there was a really good reason for working in the dark - the curved screen meant that you'd get a specular highlight somewhere on your screen as soon as you switched on a light. That problem simply doesn't exist for LCD panels (and modern flat CRTs): you can always position those to NOT see a specular reflection from where you sit.
So: switch on your office lights, play around with the positioning of screen and lights until you don't see specularities, and then switch to dark on light background. Your eyes will thank you for it!
The problem is: "medium ambient light" isn't really a very specific term, and you haven't really specified the monitor brightness, either (although most monitors have a white of about 300-600 cd/m^2, so a good estimate is fairly easy on that side).
As pointed out by other posters, your screen intensity should about match the ambient brightness. That means, you set your background to roughly match your environment (color doesn't matter as much, but intensity does(*)). Then you set your foreground color to provide the maximum contrast to that background. I.e. if your background is dark because you are in a dark room, then you choose a bright foreground color. If your background is bright, because you are in a bright room, then you choose a dark foreground.
Easy, no?
(*) If you want to go really fancy, you can adjust your color scheme to the color temperature of your room illumination. This is not that important for shells and web browsing, but it is highly recommended for photography work.
The GP is right. Ambient illumination definitely plays into it, as does the type of monitor (or rather, the reflectance of the monitor, which is roughly determined by whether you have a CRT or an LCD).
If you are in a dark room, anything with a white background is waaay too bright, and light color on dark is preferrable. In a bright environment, on the other hand, the you see more reflections against a dark background, so you want to make your background bright, and the font color dark.
I doesn't matter what you agree with. The law does not differentiate between different forms of copying.
If you take a book, and sell manually re-typed copies, that infringes copyright just as if you had photocopied it. Hell, even if you go to a Brittney Spears concert, write down the score and lyrics, and re-perform the songs commercially, it STILL is a copyright violation.
The notes you take in class are your fair use copies of the original material. You are not allowed to resell them without permission.
Well, I've taken a few courses on copyright law myself, and what is more, I've had to go through with defending some copyright of my own work (with the help of a lawyer, of course).
These guys are copying down, word for word, the contents of the overhead transparencies. Wanna a bet whether that is a copyright violation?
OK, I'll take a "guess": yes, there is a copyright.
EVERY work of authorship (including lecture notes and whatever) is AUTOMATICALLY copyrighted, although whether the author enforces copyright is his/her own business. That is the law, deal with it.
So? All you paid for is access to the information, not the right to redistribute, especially commercially. This is like selling counterfeit CDs, and damn right the prof has the right to stop it.
They are not trying to win an economics nobel prize, they are trying to sell whisky.
This whole tinfoil hat discussion is way overboard. This is just a high tech version of a focus group study, which is something advertisers have been doing for ages. So long as they are only measuring brain activity of volunteer subjects instead of their actual customers, they can do whatever the fuck they want.
I would be very interested in what he learned between 2002 and 2004 that led him to argue so eloquently against Phillip Slusallek. I'd also like to know what Professor Slusallek is doing at nVidia, where he's "working with the research group on the future of realtime ray tracing". Alternatively, you could ask yourself why Philipp (that's the real spelling of his name), is wasting his time doing a sabbatical at NVIDIA if he so eloquently argued against the need for GPUs two years earlier? Could it be that he didn't forsee CUDA, and how flexible and programmable the 8800 would be, while David knew exactly what NVIDIA had in the pipe, but couldn't talk about it at the time? But then again, I only do this for a living, so what do I know.
Your post makes me think that Intel will attempt a take-over of Nvidia, hostile or otherwise. But I have no knowledge in this area. Why would they? Intel already has the biggest GPU marketshare (bout 50% or so), and they achieve that with integrated graphics, that are arguably the way of the future. My guess is that NVIDIA will become the SGI of the early 21st century - they'll cater to a high-speed niche market. Too bad, actually, I kind of like their cards (and they have by far the best 3D Linux performance).
Anyhow, my question is if you miss a flight because of these TSA guys, does your airline put you on the next available flight at no extra cost? Only if you are missing an "official" connection, but not if you are missing the first flight in a sequence. The rationale is that you arr repsonsible for showing up at the airport in time to catch your first flight, and they are responsible for you making the connections (*) if they have offered you a ticket, even if there are only 30 minutes between one arrival and the next departure.
(*) of course the airline may bail out if they learn that you were delayed because you uttered a bomb thread or something similarly stupid.
Huh? You can drive around (or hike, take the bus/train) within the Schengen region without showing ANY kindy of ID. For air travel you need either a passport or a national ID card, but that is even true for flights within one country.
I read another report that said it was about product piracy (fake iPhones etc.). I find that version easier to believe, since AFAIK patents are a purely civil matter across Europe. And you can bet your ass that if it was piracy-related, the same could happen in the US as well. Here in Canada/Vancouver, we had similar raids last summer on some open air markets where police were cracking down on vendors selling fake Prada purses and the like.
That was most definitely not the last time Cnaada developed a plane. Baombardier must have developed a dozen new plane models since then. It MAY be the last time Canada developed a FIGHTER plane (I wouldn't know for sure), but maybe you can give it a rest after 50 years? Sheesh.
I completely agree on the MIT comparisons, but this:
I'm obviously biased, but I like the U of T approach: classical. Give everyone the same education and chuck them all into the market and let life sort them out doesn't make sense to me. EVERY university is in the business of picking winners; it is called "admissions".
One problem that Candadian Universities face is that because of their public status, and (in most provinces) the resulting mandate to educate the masses, the variance of student capabilities is much higher than at elite universities down south. Most lectures will aim somehwere at the center third of the students, leaving behind the bottom third, and not really challenging the top third at all. The way to fix that is to offer tutoring to the bottom third, and more challenging activities such as research involvment (or this new "VeloCity" thingie) to the top third.
Well, I have an MMath in CS from Waterloo. Let me tell you that UW is nothing like MIT or any other top notch university. UW's achievements are almost exclusively on the undergrad teaching level, and while that is great if you are an undergrad and want to be taught, it doesn't put UW anywhere in the same league as a true research university like MIT (or UofT, UBC, and McGill in Canada).
"Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that." - George Carlin Nice, except it isn't necessarily true. Half the people are more stupid (WTF is "stupider" anyways) than the MEDIAN, not the AVERAGE (i.e. mean). I guess that puts George Carlin in the wrong half.
Slashdot Mirror
http://xkcd.com/327/
Mod parent up!!!
There is still alot of confusion around that DX11 "announcement". Time for somebody to set it right!
God, where are my mod points. That was the funniest post I've read in a while.
Does your rural/suburbian home still look that inexpensive?
So, since binocular stereo does not normally give you depth info for the movie setting, ALL 3D films do one of two things (otherwise you wouldn't see any 3D effect at all):
Both methods are known to cause motion/simulator sickness in a significant portion of the population. To really make good use of binocular stereo, you have to have a screen that is much closer than what you have in a movie theater.
No, different settings for different environments. Is your reading comprehension really that poor?
I know a lot of geeks like dark working environments. However, it is well established that this is bad for your eyes in the longer run (especially if you also need to read printed documents in the same environment, even occasionally!). When we still had CRTs, there was a really good reason for working in the dark - the curved screen meant that you'd get a specular highlight somewhere on your screen as soon as you switched on a light. That problem simply doesn't exist for LCD panels (and modern flat CRTs): you can always position those to NOT see a specular reflection from where you sit.
So: switch on your office lights, play around with the positioning of screen and lights until you don't see specularities, and then switch to dark on light background. Your eyes will thank you for it!
As pointed out by other posters, your screen intensity should about match the ambient brightness. That means, you set your background to roughly match your environment (color doesn't matter as much, but intensity does(*)). Then you set your foreground color to provide the maximum contrast to that background. I.e. if your background is dark because you are in a dark room, then you choose a bright foreground color. If your background is bright, because you are in a bright room, then you choose a dark foreground.
Easy, no?
(*) If you want to go really fancy, you can adjust your color scheme to the color temperature of your room illumination. This is not that important for shells and web browsing, but it is highly recommended for photography work.
If you are in a dark room, anything with a white background is waaay too bright, and light color on dark is preferrable. In a bright environment, on the other hand, the you see more reflections against a dark background, so you want to make your background bright, and the font color dark.
If you take a book, and sell manually re-typed copies, that infringes copyright just as if you had photocopied it. Hell, even if you go to a Brittney Spears concert, write down the score and lyrics, and re-perform the songs commercially, it STILL is a copyright violation.
The notes you take in class are your fair use copies of the original material. You are not allowed to resell them without permission.
Well, I've taken a few courses on copyright law myself, and what is more, I've had to go through with defending some copyright of my own work (with the help of a lawyer, of course). These guys are copying down, word for word, the contents of the overhead transparencies. Wanna a bet whether that is a copyright violation?
OK, I'll take a "guess": yes, there is a copyright. EVERY work of authorship (including lecture notes and whatever) is AUTOMATICALLY copyrighted, although whether the author enforces copyright is his/her own business. That is the law, deal with it.
So? All you paid for is access to the information, not the right to redistribute, especially commercially. This is like selling counterfeit CDs, and damn right the prof has the right to stop it.
This whole tinfoil hat discussion is way overboard. This is just a high tech version of a focus group study, which is something advertisers have been doing for ages. So long as they are only measuring brain activity of volunteer subjects instead of their actual customers, they can do whatever the fuck they want.
Huh? I must have missed the part where the subjects were forced to participate.
When I saw this summary, I had to think of the nGrain engine. Are you familiar with that? What are the differences?
Huh? You can drive around (or hike, take the bus/train) within the Schengen region without showing ANY kindy of ID. For air travel you need either a passport or a national ID card, but that is even true for flights within one country.
I read another report that said it was about product piracy (fake iPhones etc.). I find that version easier to believe, since AFAIK patents are a purely civil matter across Europe. And you can bet your ass that if it was piracy-related, the same could happen in the US as well. Here in Canada/Vancouver, we had similar raids last summer on some open air markets where police were cracking down on vendors selling fake Prada purses and the like.
That was most definitely not the last time Cnaada developed a plane. Baombardier must have developed a dozen new plane models since then. It MAY be the last time Canada developed a FIGHTER plane (I wouldn't know for sure), but maybe you can give it a rest after 50 years? Sheesh.
One problem that Candadian Universities face is that because of their public status, and (in most provinces) the resulting mandate to educate the masses, the variance of student capabilities is much higher than at elite universities down south. Most lectures will aim somehwere at the center third of the students, leaving behind the bottom third, and not really challenging the top third at all. The way to fix that is to offer tutoring to the bottom third, and more challenging activities such as research involvment (or this new "VeloCity" thingie) to the top third.
Well, I have an MMath in CS from Waterloo. Let me tell you that UW is nothing like MIT or any other top notch university. UW's achievements are almost exclusively on the undergrad teaching level, and while that is great if you are an undergrad and want to be taught, it doesn't put UW anywhere in the same league as a true research university like MIT (or UofT, UBC, and McGill in Canada).